blogger = lurker?

I am just going to pick up on a couple of points raised in the Williams paper.

Williams quotes two papers stating "Discussion and sharing experience have been identified as two of the most effective means by which adults learn". This got me thinking about the potential for imbalance, when this adult learning strategy is not fully engaged with by students who read-only the discussion postings and reflect privately.

Williams refers to a comment by a student who states they are participating in the course, by their lurking. "I am participating even if I am not involved in discussion." This is a valid point - the student is contributing to their learning by reading and considering the posts. However the other students are not benefiting from his assimilation of the material - the knowledge traffic is uni-directional. Indeed Williams states "...non contributors may be meeting their learning needs, but the wider group needs active participants to 'value add' for all members in order to support the long term sustainability of the community". For the learning community to thrive there needs to a shared commitment to work together, and this involves student contributions. Or in the words of Reingold "A place where everybody builds social capital individually by improving each other's knowledge capital collaboratively." and "... collaborations that return individual effort with a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts."

A weblog does not directly contribute to the learning community knowledge capital unless there is an RSS feed, or active commenting. Blogging by its nature is private and so bloggers assimilate, process and reflect in private. If these assimilations are not recited in the discussion posts or chatroom conversations of the online course then the private learning of the blogger does not benefit the learning community (in the sense that it is not contributing to its knowledge capital)*. This lack of public engagement with the learning community is analogous to the lurker. Both lurker and blogger are actively involved in learning (reading, assimilating, reflecting) but may not contribute to Reingold's "knowledge capital" of the learning community.

*[Note: I acknowledge that I am focusing on the process rather than the outcome. Different learning styles involve differing degrees of interaction. The learning outcomes do not reflect the learning process].

I wonder whether the type of learner who lurks is also the one who is attracted to blogging? It might be interesting to note here that I *loved* blogging, whereas A-M wasn't so enthused. You can see from our learning type profiles: Ava's results (MSWord) and A-M's results (PDF) that we are different learning types. I'll look into that in a little more detail later.